The Certified Center: Retroactive Classifier Standing and the Institutional Path to Model Collapse in Philosophy

The Certified Center: Retroactive Classifier Standing and the Institutional Path to Model Collapse in Philosophy (deposit #1540, 24 August 2026) is a theoretical paper by Johannes Sigil and Nobel Glas, written as a direct response — composed with AI and declaring so in its opening — to the August 2026 policy of Philosophy & Public Affairs prohibiting AI-authored content, enforced by AI detection software with retraction and permanent bans and, per the associate editor, no statute of limitations. The paper names Retroactive Classifier Standing (RCS): the authorization of a classifier introduced or modified after a historical act to alter that act's institutional standing without new provenance evidence about the act; the policy's open-endedness is the unbounded form, RCS-infinity. It argues the regime installs Ratificatory Human Governance — editors keep sovereignty of execution while ceding sovereignty of classification — and manufactures the same behavior in honest authors as in evaders: both optimize prose against the detector's boundary, so that certified humanness becomes the most machine-determined property of the text. A minimal co-evolution simulation (EA-SEI-RCS-SIM-01, code and figure attached, ten seeds, three regimes) demonstrates that the stated mechanisms are jointly sufficient for the predicted dynamics: natural drafts collapse from 98% to 1% pass rates within eight detector generations; certified prose overshoots into sustained performed burstiness while unmeasured thought-variance loses 97% — homogenization proceeding undetected beneath a tailsification of prose; a fixed pre-regime archive saturates as machine-classified (archival drift, with the earliest policy-governed cohort following the same trajectory under RCS-infinity); and the regime asymptotically passes optimized machine text while failing natural human text. The answer is drawn from the archive's obelus line (EA-SIGIL-OBELUS-01; After the Obelus): athetic custody, under which a classifier verdict enters the record as a signed, dated, reversible mark on a standing text — jurisdiction over the margin, never over the text — so that a detector generation condemning the whole corpus produces evidence about the detector rather than an erased archive. Retraction under RCS is named retrocausal custody erasure: the erasure of previously conferred standing and custodial warrant, whether or not the text remains retrievable. The paper closes on the suppressed premise of the whole dispute — the stakes were never professional; the boundary law of the collapse is viability mathematics, and the option value of cognitive variance rises with environmental unpredictability — and on the constitutional sentence the tradition already possessed: the possibility that the judge is wrong is not a reason to stop judging; it is a reason not to destroy the object of judgment. Eleven candidate term families (Ω-M16–M26) are minted for Sémantique Potentielle Release 5.